Tuesday, July 6, 2010

No more bold missions, fueled by genius and American Exceptionalism. No more will we be able watch launches from Cape Canaveral, or see the majesty of the shuttle program, or watch on live TV of the Hubble being repaired by American Astronauts performing astounding repairs at the end of a telescoping arm from the bay of the Shuttle. No more amazing transmissions of the Rovers on Mars.

The rocket scientist launched to victory in November of 2008 has farmed out sending our brave Astronauts into space to the Russians. Recently their antiquated technology, was not capable of resupplying the International Space Station, and the resupply capsule missed it's target and shot past the outpost high above our atmosphere.What is our new mission in space...too surreal to even imagine.

We are to make Muslim Children feel good about their technological advances.

Gone the bold vision of President Kennedy. What is the vision of the Space Cadet in Chief? Lets see...the Mars program: scrapped...Moon colonization: scrapped. . Space Shuttle program: scrapped (or soon will be)... Ambitious new programs originating from NASA: none. Rank as #1 space exploration agency in the world: all but gone and fading fast, soon to be the new arm of Space Cadet in Chief's Muslim politically correct agenda.

What an outrage!

NASA is to promote a sense of self esteem to a self-identified culture completely ruled by men. A patriarchal society that renounces technology, prohibits young women education, treats women like chattel, who seemingly live in the dark ages wrapped in cruelty and inequality from the dark ages and whose madrasas (schools) teach the hatred found in the Koran to fledgling suicide bombers.

Brings a whole to new meaning, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

On May 5, 1961, when I was 14, lucky me, I was able to watch TV when Alan Shepard, in a capsule on the left, was the first American to be launched into space. I watched the grainy black and white coverage. I was proud and thrilled that although the Russians three weeks prior had sent cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin into space, we had now also engaged in an exciting endeavor.

It was the beginning of my love affair with NASA, and it marked the beginning of the real race to explore where no man had gone before.

The first U.S. spaceship was a cone-shaped one-man capsule with a cylinder mounted on top. Two meters (6 ft, 10 in) long, 1.9 meters (6 ft, 2 1/2 in) in diameter, a 5.8meter (19 ft, 2 in) escape tower was fastened to the cylinder of the capsule. The blunt end was covered with an ablative heat shield to protect it against the 3,000 degree heat of entry into the atmosphere.Image at left: Insignia's from each of six manned Mercury 7 missions and autographs of the original seven NASA astronauts encircle the Mercury spacecraft. Image credit: NASA + View Large Image

The Mercury program used two launch vehicles: A Redstone for the suborbital and an Atlas for the four orbital flights. Prior to the manned flights, unmanned tests of the booster and the capsule, carrying a chimpanzee, were made. Each astronaut named his capsule and added the numeral 7 to denote the teamwork of the original astronauts.

John Glenn, was the first Astronaut to orbit the earth, just nine months after Alan Shepard's first flight to space.

On September 12, 1962 President John F. Kennedy said in Houston, Texas:"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon... (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

When I was 22, I watched Neil Armstrong place the first of many American Astronauts footprints on the that beautiful pearl in the sky, the moon. A feat 41 years later no other nation has been able to duplicate.

When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — [Obama] charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."

“NASA is not only a space exploration agency,” Bolden concluded, “but also an earth improvement agency.”

..."As Moscow and Beijing have long appreciated, unavoidable verification and definitional problems ensure that, as a practical matter, any treaty likely to emerge from such talks would further weaken America's ability to protect its interests in space and on the ground — without denying such advantages to our potential adversaries.

As in so many areas, it seems President Obama's space policies and programs are designed to "fundamentally transform" America from a preeminent world power to just another nation, dependent on the good will and assistance of others to safeguard its interests.

To the extent that such reliance is placed on sources like the Russians, the Chinese and "the Muslim world" that have made little secret of their ambition to weaken, if not destroy, the United States, it is likely to end badly, as it did for poor Blanche DuBois. "

The following pictures are some of my personal favorites from NASA Space Missions:

I never tire of watching this behemoth lift off from it's launch pad, or watching this huge machine glide to a touchdown, whether at Edwards or Cape Canaveral.

And two of the three great tragedies of the United Statesmissions in space happened with the Shuttle, one an explosion after lift off due to a problem with the infamous O Ring, and the second a result of damage to the tiles which caused failure in the structure and the Shuttle to disintegrate over central Texas.

And there is this exquisite beauty of an Astronaut repairing the Hubble ( my favorite the United States ever sent to the heavens) on the retractable arm from the bay of the Shuttle with the earth in the background with the unmistakable gulf of Aden.

Last summer when the last mission was sent to 'make the Hubble right' my husband and I watched every single repair that the teams performed on Hubble.

Their skill and precision and absolutely perfect mechanical workman like excellence left both of us spellbound. Not one duty, was left undone. The teams with the help of engineers on the ground solved every installation issue, and successfully completed the mission.

No other nation on the planet has been able to send live images equal to these, nor has any other nation been able to perform this level of engineering excellence.

On this site are some of the most stunning and beautiful pictures from space that you can find. It is hard to argue that there is no God, when viewing the incredible majesty of the universe.

In picture after picture my sense of amazement and my understanding of God's perfect design is shown in each and every photo that I have viewed with awe.

No other nation has been able to both launch, repair and use a telescope that can match the majesty of the images, or the engineering skill or ability to even make a mission comparable what NASA and the United States has with the Hubble.

And who among us can but marvel at the two tiny rovers deployed to Mars!

Once again real engineers and scientist were able to overcome obstacles and share with us the amazing feat of two tiny machines on Mars sending data back to earth.

I repeat no other nation on this planet has been able to match this feat or perform the technology necessary to place these two machines on another planet.

Here are a list of links associated with this topic that I used as resources to compose this blog.